Born in New York City in 1998, Traci Johnson is an emerging contemporary artist whose tapestries navigate the intersections of spirituality, sexuality, and identity. Johnson received a BFA in Fine Art from the Fashion Institute of Technology, where they began developing a practice centered on reclamation and transformation.

Johnson's work emerges from a deeply personal confrontation with the tensions between religious upbringing and queer identity. Drawing from their experiences growing up in a strict Christian environment, Johnson transforms the language of sanctuary, once a site of both refuge and shame, into radical sites of liberation. Their tapestries depict figures interconnected with nature, inhabiting realms freed from the projections inherited from the church, and where queerness is naturalized within their healing space.

Central to Johnson's practice is the collapse of distance between creator and subject. Offering their own body as both site and source, Johnson employs a process of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction that mirrors the reconstitution of self. Through this methodology, personal narrative becomes collective testimony, inviting viewers to recognize themselves and imagine their own paths toward wholeness. The meditative repetition of tufting functions as both ritual and roadmap, embedding affirmations that manifest physically and metaphorically within each work.

Johnson's tapestries are populated with symbols that all signal journeys of clarity and rebirth. These symbols, combined with the artist's manipulated self-portraiture, create emotionally charged experiences that explore spirituality, sexuality, and nature as inseparable components of the divine self. Johnson's work transforms internalized pain into resistance, empowering viewers to construct their own sanctuaries within themselves.